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couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. I wish you could have seen his face! If looks could kill I’d be stone dead, but the rest of them were like me – howling!’
    ‘You’ve made an enemy there, then, Armstrong,’ Sally said, when the laugh was over.
    Armstrong was thoughtful for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s not that bad. He’s vain, and he likes women, but he’s not vindictive. In fact, he’s treated
me with a bit more respect since then. I don’t envy Dunkley, though. She’ll have her work cut out trying to make
him
forsake all others. She’d better keep him on a very
short lead.’
    ‘I pity her if Matron finds out, as well,’ said Curran. ‘Sure, and she’ll be down the drive with her suitcases. I don’t blame her, though. What woman wouldn’t
get her hooks into him, given half a chance, and who wants a man nobody else wants?’ She looked at Sally. ‘You’re wasted on the officers’ ward, so you are; you’ve got
no enterprise at all. I only came to nursing to get a good catch, and what do they do but keep me skivvying on women’s wards. They must have read my mind.’
    ‘Aye, I suppose they did,’ Sally said. ‘They probably had an idea that if they put you on the officers’ ward you’d flirt with them all, and then they’d have
to kick you out for being
morally doubtful’
    ‘Nature takes no notice of morality,’ said Armstrong. ‘I read that in a book somewhere, so that means it’s true.’
    ‘Ach, there’s not much Nature here; sure and we’re nothing but a lot of old nuns. Come on,’ Curran jogged her elbow. ‘Let’s get back to the cloister; see if
we can get a cup of tea before it’s time for the lecture.’
    Oh, for pity’s sake, the twice-weekly lecture. Another hour taken up. They’d have no time to relax at all before it was time for bed. Sally stuffed another forkful of food into her
mouth, imagining what her mother would say to see a daughter of hers eating like a wolf. Never mind, she just had time to finish the meal, grab a cup of tea and fling herself into the deep feather
cushions of one of the settees in the probationers’ sitting room, and tuck her aching legs under her for a few blessed minutes until Home Sister came to usher them all into the lecture.
    ‘It was in the last years of the last century that pathologists began co-operating with clinicians to detect microbes of diphtheria and tubercle bacillus in the throats
and sputum of living patients,’ the pathologist began, ‘rather than waiting until they were dead to carry out our investigations, as we had before, ha, ha, ha!’
    Ha, ha, ha. He really was hilarious. Sally stifled a yawn, and was rewarded with a sharp jab in the ribs from Curran’s elbow.
    ‘. . . and that’s how departments of clinical pathology came into being. Then the war came, and laboratory work proved itself of some use in the treatment of wounds and the
prevention of sickness . . .’
    It was all very fascinating, and Sally heard enough of what he said to get much of the lecture down in the sort of automatic writing that the mediums were good at. Details of bacteriology, the
sowing of culture media with discharges from wounds, the cutting and staining of sections of tumours and tissue – all slid across the surface of her numb brain, ran down her arm and through
her pencil almost of their own accord.
    Why do they always give us these lectures when we’re half asleep, she wondered, heaving herself up what seemed endless flights of stairs to her room. Roused a little by the exertion, she
scanned her notes before putting away her notebook and undressing for bed. What bliss it was to lie down and close her eyes. She tried to go over the lecture in her mind, to fix it in her memory.
It was no use. Her thoughts would wander off the subject.
    They wandered to the conversation in the dining room, when she’d told the others that Dunkley hadn’t shown the lieutenant much sympathy. Truth was, she’d shown